The LGBT outrage mob claims another trophy. When will people learn to stop apologizing to them? Also, does Christmas have pagan origins? (Hint: no, that's stupid). And why do parents feel the need to film themselves punishing their children? Date: 12-07-2018 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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| Today on the Matt Walsh Show, the outraged mob claims another trophy. | |
| This time it's the head of comedian Kevin Hart. | |
| Also, is Christmas pagan? | |
| We will deal with that enduring and rather stupid myth. | |
| And finally, why do parents feel the need to film themselves disciplining their kids? | |
| This is a trend that I think needs to stop. | |
| We'll talk about that today on the Matt Walsh Show. | |
| Kevin Hart, famous comedian, tapped this week to host the upcoming Oscars. | |
| And then the requisite next step commenced where people went to dig up his old tweets and his old comedy bits to try and destroy him. | |
| And I want to pause here just for a moment to try to, just to reflect on this. | |
| Think about how petty and empty And miserable and wretched you have to be to think in that way. | |
| Where someone is offered a high profile job opportunity and your first reaction is, oh, let's go through his old tweets to try to destroy him for no reason at all. | |
| That is the thought process of a truly demented person, but apparently there are many such people in our country today. | |
| So, the bullies went to work and they dug up some old tweets and a couple of lines from a stand-up special eight or ten years ago, and they said the jokes were anti-gay, demanded that he apologize. | |
| Initially, I was impressed because Hart refused to apologize. | |
| He said, look, I've already apologized. | |
| I'm not going to do it again. | |
| I'm not going to keep doing this. | |
| And then he lost the job, was forced to step down. | |
| And unfortunately, as he stepped down, he apologized again, even though he'd already lost the job. | |
| But I'm sure he apologized because at this point, Kevin Hart is a movie star and he's making movies all the time. | |
| And so he's thinking about that. | |
| And I guess he figured that if he doesn't apologize, he might start losing those opportunities as well. | |
| What were these terribly offensive anti-gay jokes? | |
| Well, the outrage seems to focus primarily on a bit from his comedy special back in 2010 where he said that he's not homophobic. | |
| But he doesn't want his son to be gay. | |
| And then he talked about the fear that he experiences when he sees his son playing with feminine toys or acting in a feminine way. | |
| Basically, two ways of interpreting a bit like that. | |
| The first way is we could say, it's a joke. | |
| He's a comedian. | |
| He's telling a joke. | |
| The whole point of the joke is that he's saying something that's not considered appropriate in modern society. | |
| It's offensive to many people. | |
| Or to some people, anyway. | |
| And that's the joke. | |
| That's the whole point of the joke. | |
| It's a joke. | |
| He's telling a joke. | |
| He's a comedian telling a joke. | |
| That's what comedians do. | |
| That's one way of looking at it. | |
| That, I think, is the correct way of interpreting it. | |
| The other way to look at it If you are intent on taking it seriously, and not as a joke, well then, okay. | |
| In that case, he is a person, a parent, honestly sharing his own desires and preferences for his son. | |
| He's honestly talking about what he personally wants for his child. | |
| And I think, even if you look at it that way, it's still incredibly stupid to be outraged. | |
| Because it's just his opinion. | |
| Is he not entitled to have his own views about parenting and his own priorities and preferences for his family? | |
| Maybe he really wants his son to get married and have children so the family line is carried on. | |
| It's a really normal thing for a father to want. | |
| Is he not allowed to desire that? | |
| Or maybe, you know, he's listened to the left, claiming that gays are bullied and persecuted in our country, and he doesn't want that for his child. | |
| Whatever his reason, that's his opinion. | |
| It's his view. | |
| Now, what if he had said... What if he had said that... One of his fears is that he doesn't want his son to date a white woman. | |
| You know, as a black man, he doesn't want his son dating a white woman. | |
| What if that was the joke that he had made? | |
| Again, we would be able to look at it in two ways. | |
| Number one, we could say, it's just a joke. | |
| He's telling a joke. | |
| He's a comedian. | |
| Or two, we could say, he's being honest. | |
| He's sharing how he feels, what he wants for his family. | |
| And either way, there's no reason to take offense. | |
| It would make no sense for me to be offended as a white person. | |
| It would make no sense for me to say, how dare you have your own preferences and priorities in relation to your own son? | |
| It's none of my business. | |
| If that's what he wants for his son, then whatever. | |
| But of course, I talk about outrage, and I use that word metaphorically, really, because there is rarely any real outrage in this country. | |
| Outrage is now just perfunctory. | |
| I mean, did anyone really care about Kevin Hart's stand-up bit from eight years ago? | |
| Was anyone really upset about his tweets? | |
| I doubt it. | |
| No, no, see, they're just pretending, because this is what people do now. | |
| You know, I know, at first blush, it seems like people are more sensitive now than they used to be, and maybe they are, okay? | |
| They probably are in a lot of ways, but I don't think that's why the outrage, the... | |
| These explosions of outrage. | |
| I don't think that's why it's so common. | |
| I think it's just a matter of efficiency. | |
| Public outrage used to be kind of on manual. | |
| It used to be stick shift. | |
| You had to manually change gears in order to get the outrage going, but now it's automatic. | |
| We shift into outrage mode automatically. | |
| We shift into outrage gear automatically. | |
| In other words, I don't think there are necessarily more people offended by jokes now than there were, say, 20 years ago. | |
| I think it's just that because of the internet, the outraged crew is more efficient, they can cover more ground, they can get outraged quicker and about more things. | |
| That's really what that is. | |
| That's really what it is with the internet. | |
| I think you have basically the same number of petty, busybodies who are looking to be offended by jokes, the same number of them, but now they have this Because of the technology and the internet, they have this avenue that allows them to get to... It allows them, number one, to find a bunch of things to be outraged about, and then it allows them to very quickly voice that outrage in a way that, you know, doesn't take a lot of effort. | |
| You can just send out a tweet saying, oh, I'm outraged by Kevin Hart, and that's it. | |
| And then, boom, if enough people do that, you've got an outrage mob. | |
| And that is why, as I have said a hundred times, and I'll say a hundred more times, that's why you should never apologize to them. | |
| You should never apologize to the outrage mob. | |
| Never apologize. | |
| No matter what you said, no matter what provoked them, whether you were wrong or right, never apologize to them. | |
| Because it's just a game. | |
| It's disingenuous. | |
| They're not even really upset. | |
| And even if they really are upset, you don't owe them anything. | |
| You didn't hurt them. | |
| These are just people, disconnected from it. | |
| How is anyone really hurt? | |
| How is your life actually affected by a joke that Kevin Hart told eight years ago? | |
| And then in what way is anything made better? | |
| Or in what way do you benefit from him being forced to apologize? | |
| You were never hurt to begin with. | |
| The apology does nothing for you. | |
| So there's no reason to engage in it. | |
| And I really wish that Hart hadn't apologized. | |
| But more than that, I wish we did not have this crew of empty, bored bullies looking to destroy people for no reason. | |
| There's an email that someone sent that I thought was interesting. | |
| Raises a point that you hear a lot at this time of year, so I wanted to read it and try to respond to it. | |
| Email says, Hi Matt, I love your podcast, listen to it every day. | |
| I think you have really great insight to many subjects, especially religion. | |
| I guess I didn't really need to read this part of the email to you, but I am anyway. | |
| This holiday season, I've been hearing a lot that Christmas is actually a pagan holiday. | |
| I am a practicing Christian that grew up in the Catholic Church, and in my family we have always celebrated Christmas as the birth of our Savior, Jesus Christ. | |
| I've done some research, and I realize that there are some Christmas traditions that have a root in the pagan holiday of celebrating the winter solstice, but that does not change in my heart what Christmas means to me. | |
| I am thinking that maybe Christmas is a mixture of many different traditions with, of course, a heavy dose of commercialism. | |
| I would love to hear your take on this and how to discuss this subject with others that insist that Christmas is a pagan holiday that has nothing to do with Jesus. | |
| Thanks for your consideration. | |
| All right. | |
| Yes, this is indeed an enduring meme, and you hear it from atheists and Christians alike, mainly from atheists, but there are some Christians who don't celebrate Christmas because of its alleged pagan origins. | |
| And the whole thing is completely silly, in my opinion. | |
| The first thing we can say here about whether or not this or that Christmas tradition has, quote, pagan origins, the first thing we can say is, it doesn't matter. | |
| Who cares? | |
| Yes, it's probably true that pagans used Christmas trees in religious rituals before they were Christmas trees. | |
| So what? | |
| Why does that matter? | |
| What does that prove exactly? | |
| It's not like we're taking part in the pagan ritual itself. | |
| The Christian Christmas tree supplanted, replaced, took over, overrode the pagan tradition. | |
| By the way, pagans also worshipped in temples. | |
| Does that mean that we shouldn't go to church? | |
| Pagans had great big feasts to celebrate their gods. | |
| Does that mean that we should get rid of Thanksgiving too? | |
| Pagans were the first to do a lot of things because the vast majority of people in ancient times were pagan. | |
| Before Christianity came along, you had Judaism. | |
| And then you had pagans. | |
| You had this small tribe of Jews, and then everybody else in the world was pagan. | |
| So, as Christianity spread, it did absorb some of the culture of these pagan civilizations, but their culture, not their religion, not their dogma, their culture. | |
| So what? | |
| Why does that matter? | |
| What does that prove? | |
| And this is also what makes it really difficult to say which tradition or which element has pagan origins, because cultures mingle and interact and change and evolve. | |
| And with any one tradition, it's often impossible to say where exactly it started. | |
| The Christmas celebration in modern America is a mix of many things, like the emailer mentioned. | |
| There's commercialization, there's a lot of that. | |
| There's old Christian tradition as well, some of which may have began as pagan traditions, or maybe not. | |
| And then, hopefully not overshadowed by all of this, you have the actual religious significance of the event. | |
| So, were pagans the first ones to use evergreens for religious purposes? | |
| Probably. | |
| Doesn't matter. | |
| Were the pagans the first to have a religious feast in late December? | |
| Yeah, doesn't matter. | |
| Did the whole flying reindeer and fat guy coming down the chimney thing come from pagans? | |
| No, those evolved in more modern times. | |
| But it doesn't matter. | |
| Traditions and customs are like this. | |
| They change, they evolve, they take on different flavors, different meanings over time. | |
| That's just what it means to live in a human society. | |
| And pretty much any human tradition you can think of Has been influenced and has changed and has origins in many different areas of the world. | |
| So what? | |
| What matters is the theology of Christmas. | |
| God incarnate, born of a virgin, that's the part that matters. | |
| And yeah, if you could prove that came from pagans, then we'd have a serious problem on our hands. | |
| But you can prove no such thing. | |
| Because the pagan theological parallels are way, way, way overstated by atheists, and usually they are overstated by people who have not the slightest clue about ancient history or about pagan mythology. | |
| So, for instance, you will hear it claimed that Jesus is modeled on Mithra, on the pagan god Mithra, because, among other things, Mithra had a virgin birth. | |
| Well, there are a few problems here. | |
| Mithra was born from a rock. | |
| Now, perhaps it was a virgin rock, but still, I think we would agree that's a very different kind of thing. | |
| Also, the cult of Mithra took form kind of around the same time as Christianity, and it grew parallel to Christianity. | |
| So it seems that Mithraism borrowed from Christianity, not the other way around. | |
| Another pagan parallel you hear a lot about is, and this isn't a Christmas thing, this is one you hear around Easter, Adonis. | |
| A pagan deity who was allegedly a dying and rising god. | |
| Except there are actually no texts saying that Adonis rose from the dead. | |
| That's a misnomer. | |
| It's said that the Egyptian god Horus—this is a big one you'll hear a lot about. | |
| You've probably seen that the Egyptian god Horus had a miraculous birth like Jesus. | |
| Yes, but the miracle there was that his mom resurrected his dad, gave his dad a golden penis after his original member had been cut off and eaten by a fish, and then they conceived Horus. | |
| It's hard for me to see much of a theological connection between that and what Christians believe. | |
| You'll hear about the Greek god Erechtheus. | |
| You'll hear that he had a virgin birth. | |
| Well, not really. | |
| He sprang from the ground spontaneously when some divine seed spilled on the ground after a thwarted rape attempt in heaven. | |
| Again, not Not very similar at all to what Christians believe. | |
| And I could go on and on. | |
| The point is, when somebody mentions these alleged Jesus-pagan parallels, all you have to do is actually read the stories behind the mythical gods they bring up. | |
| Don't take their word for it. | |
| Go and read it for yourself. | |
| And in every case I've ever seen, the parallel breaks down. | |
| Very quickly, on further investigation, all you have to do is just go read for like a minute and you'll see, oh, this isn't the same thing at all. | |
| Not only that, but you also have to ask, when did this pagan myth originate? | |
| And what sources do we have for it? | |
| Notice that the people who make this argument, they rarely, if ever, will give you an actual source for where they're getting this from. | |
| A source as in not, you know, saying I got it from this website, that's not a source. | |
| I mean, where is this, where did this information originate from? | |
| This myth was written down at some point, and what is the earliest text we have for this myth? | |
| And for many of these myths, what you're going to find is that the earliest source we have is from like eight or nine or ten centuries after Christ. | |
| Meaning, again, if there was any influence at all one way or another, it was from Christianity to paganism, not the other way around. | |
| So, the story behind Christmas is not pagan. | |
| The traditions attached originate from many places, and no matter where they came from, they're now Christian, so it doesn't matter. | |
| As I said, though, there are some Christians who either don't celebrate Christmas at all, or who don't do the tree and all that, because of the supposed pagan roots. | |
| Now, I had always thought that that was really a Jehovah's Witness thing. | |
| But it seems to be a bit more widespread than that. | |
| I don't know how widespread. | |
| I'm not really sure how common it is, but there seem to be a certain sizable number of Christians who feel this way about Christmas. | |
| Somebody on Twitter yesterday, I was talking about this, and someone said, someone likened the Christmas tree to the golden calf. | |
| Well, there's only one problem here. | |
| Nobody worships a Christmas tree. | |
| We don't put the tree in our home to worship it. | |
| We are not tempted to worship it. | |
| We have no urge in that direction. | |
| Although, look, if it's a stumbling block for you, if you have this intense urge to worship trees, then by all means, stay away from this particular holiday tradition. | |
| But most of us have no such urge. | |
| It's just a tree. | |
| It looks nice. | |
| We put lights on it. | |
| We put decorations, and it looks nice. | |
| It smells nice. | |
| That's all. | |
| That's all we do with it. | |
| I have never in my life ever heard of a Christian worshipping a tree, or being tempted to worship a tree, or getting anywhere close to worshipping a tree. | |
| I have never heard of that. | |
| It's a non-issue. | |
| By the way, pagans worshipped everything, okay? | |
| They made gods out of everything. | |
| They had hundreds of gods. | |
| Thousands, really. | |
| They had gods for every object, every situation, everything in nature, every emotion, everything. | |
| They made idols out of trees, out of rocks, out of rivers. | |
| They made gods out of animals. | |
| They made gods out of the sun, the moon, the clouds. | |
| On and on and on and on and on. | |
| So, if you... I mean, pretty much any object you can think of that existed back then was probably used in some way in a pagan ritual, or it was infused with some sort of divine significance, because that's just how pagans operated. | |
| So if you have really set out to avoid anything that pagans worshipped, you've really, really limited yourself. | |
| I hope you never sunbathe, okay? | |
| Because worshipping the sun was a big thing for pagans. | |
| I hope you never visit a zoo. | |
| I hope you don't have any trees or rocks on your property. | |
| Because all of them are idols. | |
| Or they were idols to pagans 3,000 years ago. | |
| Also, I hope you never celebrate your birthday, which apparently this too is a thing among some Christians. | |
| I think it's a little bit less common, but arguably birthdays originated with pagans. | |
| To celebrate a birthday, that's something pagans did. | |
| Does that mean you're going to stop celebrating your birthday? | |
| Maybe you will. | |
| Or maybe you'll just continue celebrating your birthday because it doesn't matter what pagans did. | |
| What is this thing? | |
| Like, if pagans did it 3,000 years ago, they've claimed it for all time, and now we can't do it? | |
| What an absolutely silly idea! | |
| And not only that, but it's completely superstitious. | |
| You have, um... | |
| What you're saying is that a certain object or tradition carries with it some kind of curse or something, because pagans did it once. | |
| But that's not the case. | |
| Remember, St. | |
| Paul was asked whether it's okay to eat meat that was sacrificed to idols, and he said, yes, go ahead and eat it, because those gods aren't real. | |
| It doesn't matter what magic spells were cast on them. | |
| It's just meat. | |
| So eat it. | |
| It's just a meal. | |
| Who cares? | |
| So whatever way you look at it, what I would say to the person who sent the email is go ahead and celebrate Christmas and get your Christmas tree and I wouldn't worry about it. | |
| All right. | |
| Something else I... Although, listen, if you decide you don't want to do a Christmas tree just because Christmas trees are a huge, enormous hassle, and then you've got this hunk of dying wood in your home, you know, right next to your baseboard heaters or whatever, if that's why you decide not to do a Christmas tree, then I totally understand. | |
| All right, one other thing I wanted to mention quickly. | |
| A 10-year-old girl got kicked off the school bus for bullying, so her dad made her walk to school 5 miles in 36-degree temperatures. | |
| Now, the only reason we know about this is that the dad filmed it, drove behind the daughter filming her, and then posted it on social media. | |
| And it went viral and and so that's how everyone knows about it now. | |
| As for the punishment itself, walking to school, I have no problem with that. | |
| Arguably, five miles and freezing temperatures is a bit on the extreme side, but we don't know what the girl did, we don't know the full backstory, so I have no qualms with that. | |
| Disciplining your child is good. | |
| Parents should do that more often. | |
| However, why film it? | |
| Why do you need to film it and post it on Facebook? | |
| A lot of parents do that these days, and I just don't get it. | |
| I discipline my children all the time, and I have never once even considered pulling out my phone to get it on video. | |
| It's never crossed my mind. | |
| Like, if I have to send my son into timeout for talking back to his mother, I've never said, oh, wait a second, I gotta get this on video. | |
| Hey guys, look. | |
| Hey guys, just live streaming. | |
| Got my son in timeout. | |
| Yep, he talked back to his mother. | |
| Just wanted to let you guys all know. | |
| That has never occurred to me to do that. | |
| Why? | |
| Why? | |
| Why would it occur to me? | |
| Now, I suppose if we're trying to be very generous to the parents who do this, We could say that, oh, well, they're just trying to raise awareness, or something. | |
| But, first of all... | |
| Be very suspicious because raising awareness is almost always code for, I'm just trying to get attention to myself. | |
| Raising awareness is usually, I'm trying to raise awareness about myself and about my own virtue and everything. | |
| Because in general, most of the things that we raise awareness about, people are already aware of those things. | |
| We're all pretty aware of most of this stuff. | |
| So if this dad says, well, I'm raising awareness about bullying. | |
| Yeah, we know. | |
| We're aware of bullying. | |
| We really are. | |
| We know that bullying exists. | |
| We know it's a problem. | |
| We're all on the same page. | |
| So there is really nothing good that can come of that. | |
| There is not one single person who will see that video and say, Oh wow, you know what? | |
| I think bullying is a problem, you know? | |
| Now that he has just raised my awareness of bullying, and now, yeah, okay, I see it now. | |
| I didn't see it before, I see it now. | |
| No, but not a single person on earth is going to say that, because we are all completely aware. | |
| But even if it is about raising awareness of something for some reason, it's still stupid and harmful to do to your child. | |
| But I don't believe that anyway. | |
| Sorry. | |
| We are all plenty aware of parents punishing their kids. | |
| We're aware of discipline. | |
| We're aware of bullying. | |
| We're aware of the concept. | |
| No, I think you put it online because you want people to congratulate you on your wonderful parenting skills. | |
| And in the process, you are publicly humiliating your child. | |
| You are using them for self-serving purposes. | |
| You are using them for Facebook likes. | |
| And the internet is forever remember so when when you shame your child online That will be accessible forever. | |
| You can never take it down 30 years from now. | |
| It will still be a Google search away So that your child can be embarrassed about this forever Does that seem fair is that good parenting? | |
| Now I think a certain amount of embarrassment can be appropriate in a punishment I'm not saying that It's always wrong for us to punish our children in a way that might embarrass them. | |
| There are times when that's necessary. | |
| And making your child walk to school, even if you don't put it online, just making her walk those five miles, she's not going to be on the bus, her friends will know about it. | |
| Yeah, that's embarrassing. | |
| You don't need to put it online. | |
| There's already an element of kind of Of a very localized public shaming involved in it, which I think is, there's not anything necessarily wrong with that. | |
| But when you take it online and you shame your child on the internet, in front of the entire world, not just her community, not just, you know, whoever she bullied. | |
| That's one thing. | |
| All the people affected by whatever she did, they're all very local to her. | |
| They're in her school, in her community. | |
| Why does the whole world need to see that your 10-year-old daughter bullied someone? | |
| Why do millions of humans need to know about that? | |
| And then you're opening your child up to Internet comments. | |
| You're opening her up to whatever vile and hateful thing. | |
| Anytime you put something online like that, especially in a negative way about, oh, guess what this person did that's bad, even if it's your own kid, you have opened them up to bullying. | |
| To the bullying of hundreds of strangers who will say vile and nasty things about them. | |
| So, in order to teach them a lesson about bullying, you just put them out there to be bullied by hundreds of strangers? | |
| Many of whom are probably adults? | |
| That's how you teach them not to bully? | |
| And then on top of that, you're collecting likes, and you're collecting shares, and you're getting more exposure for yourself for some reason? | |
| And that just seems clearly wrong to me, clearly inappropriate. | |
| Not everything has to be online. | |
| Not everything has to be a matter for public consumption. | |
| It is possible to just deal with this problem with your family and your child and do it privately or do it within the context of your community. | |
| And as I said, within the context of the people who are actually affected by whatever she did. | |
| Nothing good, not a single good thing can come. | |
| And this is just in general. | |
| Putting your kids online, nothing good comes of that in general. | |
| But to do it in that context, to try to embarrass them, I just think it's not much of a mystery, I guess. | |
| Like, where did this daughter learn to bully? | |
| Well, I guess we just figured out where she learned it from. | |
| And I think if that's your thought process as a parent, Where your child gets in trouble for something and then you think, oh, this could go viral if I put it online. | |
| If that's your thought process, that's a problem. | |
| And I think that's disturbing. | |
| And that's something you need to seek counseling about or something. | |
| I mean, that's something you need to, that's something in your own heart that you need to really work on. | |
| But don't work on it publicly in front of everybody. | |
| All right. | |
| I guess we'll leave it there. | |
| Hope you guys have a great weekend, and we'll talk to you next week. | |
| Godspeed. | |
| Coming up on the Ben Shapiro show, Kevin Hart loses his Oscar gig for some old tweets. | |
| Democrats fulminate over voter fraud in North Carolina. | |
| And did President Trump hire any legal immigrants? | |
| The New York Times tries to nail him on it. |